Stat allocation system

In BETA forums there is an interesting idea from a member. Somehow I find this idea of Allocating points more interesting than allocating points to attributes. He basically explains a merit system in which you can increase the potency of certain actions somehow similar the way merits work in FFXI. I believe this is better for players to chose who they want to play their classes and jobs. Thus, a WAR player that wants to be a tank could enhance his/hers actions that affects tanking abilities, whereas a DD WAR could enhance his/hers offensive actions.

What do you think of this system? I believe this could give players a better grasp of what are they doing, plus avoiding that a melee class can only focus on STR just like BarteIX explained. Also, I believe there is less probability to ***** up the stats allocation because you focus on actions.

That's a little better, and I love his mockup...

But when you get right down to it, it's the same problem in a different package, albeit a much more interesting package.

When you give people the ability to tweak their numbers, you aren't offering a playstyle choice, you're offering a math choice. And your choice will invariably boil down to: 1: Use the cookie-cutter build that's been mathed out to provide the best performance 2: Do it wrong

That doesn't seem like a real choice to me. And it's fake customization, since every person taking their performance seriously will have exactly the same build. Systems like this are the reason Blizzard completely redesigned their talent system in Mists of Pandaria. Because systems like this one don't work and only serve as a trap to entice people in to gimping themselves.

A real choice is one that alters gameplay in a way the player finds interesting, but without one choice being strictly better than the others. It's SUPER tricky to pull this off, and it's significantly easier to just cobble together a system like the one you linked or the one we currently have. But ultimately, providing real choices for a player to customize how they play is the superior option.

They are just something to provide the option to balance or focus. Our choice, not SEs. If we as a group decide to apply them to a specific stat, that is "our" decision, not SEs, thereby offering the only real form of customization that can be done. Having them "Cookie cutter" vs "Wrong" is merely the mind-set of the community, and it appears that for the most part the community has already decided, they want Cookie cutter.

Personally I commend SE for allowing us to at least have some say, though it is obvious that the decision is still min/max.

As for the bland idea. Dressing it up doesn't change anything. SE is not trying to fool us with this, and has been pretty straight forward in saying that this is just something for us to use to balance or not as we see fit. Again, it's not something to break the balance of the game.

We have the option to make our characters different, though it's obvious by the number of points, and the limited influence, they know what we are going to do with them, but they are at least making it something "We" as a community decide, not them.

Except when you realize that SE has to balance around someone doing this correctly. If, for instance, I evenly distribute my 30 points across all 6 stats (+5 each), I will perform strictly worse than someone who didn't do that. Because of that, SE has to account for the idea that I will distribute my stats correctly and balance their encounters accordingly. If they don't do that, then the group that has their min/max hats on will absolutely steamroll the content and then (correctly) complain that it isn't challenging.